Adam Koralik explains the re-releases (4:3, audio etc)

(Shenmue I & II Re-Release Discussion)

Re: Adam Koralik explains the re-releases (4:3, audio etc)

Postby Spaghetti » Wed Jul 04, 2018 6:16 pm

Let's try to deescalate this a little bit...

I think Anonymous81 was also posting in the Steam discussion forums for Shenmue I & II as well, and let me tell you, that place puts the KS comments for Shenmue III to shame in terms of sheer madness. If that was them posting (as I believe it was, considering they said "peace out" pretty much around the same time they did here), then there was a commendable effort to keep calm and argue back against some shitty posters over there.

I'm not sure it was their intention to snap and decide to leave the Dojo, but dealing with the basically unmoderated hellhole of a Steam discussion board and then seeing the same major topic being raked over here, might have made things get more heated then they should have.

So let's maybe put the DRM discussion to bed for a bit.

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Re: Adam Koralik explains the re-releases (4:3, audio etc)

Postby DigitalDuck » Wed Jul 04, 2018 6:33 pm

Centrale wrote:If the Dojo has lost one thoughtful poster who chimed in on multiple Shenmue-related topics, and gained one DRM crusader who's just copy-pasting cherry-picked bits of legal code, then we're worse for it today.


Yeah, no. That's not what I did at all.

I explained that intrusive DRM does cause worse performance (especially on computers that struggle in the first place). I explained that I don't advocate for piracy, but do advocate for people fixing the games they've purchased.

I was falsely told that this was illegal, so I posted the relevant information to show otherwise. This is not cherry-picking; I linked the entire directives for all to see, and I didn't think the part about nonprofits being exempt was relevant, but if you want I can paste that too.

In response to facts, said poster dismissed my post with a lazy and already disproven ad hominem (I explicitly condemned piracy, yet somehow I'm an advocate?), much like you did with your "DRM crusader" line. If this is your definition of a "thoughtful poster" then we're clearly using different dictionaries.

All I'm saying is after purchasing the game I'll get rid of the DRM so the overhead is removed and the game runs better, and that I'm well within my moral and legal rights to do so. That's it.

I don't see how this sentiment is so horrible that it merits name-calling and leaving the forum. If there is a problem with this attitude, please, argue against it.

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Re: Adam Koralik explains the re-releases (4:3, audio etc)

Postby Spaghetti » Wed Jul 04, 2018 6:49 pm

Guys, leave it.
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Re: Adam Koralik explains the re-releases (4:3, audio etc)

Postby Ceej » Thu Jul 05, 2018 10:06 am

MiTT3NZ wrote: The 4:3 thing doesn't really make sense to me considering the cut scenes were in-engine rather than pre-rendered, though I know models were swapped in for em so it could have summat to do with that. Doesn't mean that the assets didn't exist for it though. Still it's not really a massive issue.


I posted this in the random thoughts thread, I'm not a developer by any means but I'm pretty confident that this is the reason why:

Anyone who's struggling with why expanding the cutscenes from 4:3 would be so difficult should try playing with the widescreen settings in an emulated version of Shenmue for additional context.

When something isn't "on-screen" during gameplay, the game isn't fully rendering it for what I would assume are performance reasons. The textures/assets pop in as Ryo turns to them. Since the screen will literally be wider in the HD versions, you'll be able to see more of the game world at a single time.This was possible because the game is programmed to adapt to the player's actions.

Now think about cutscenes. In comparison to gameplay, these are intricately staged and the player was never meant to "see beyond" what was on the screen at a single time. For these cutscenes to properly display, d3t would need to create and stage additional assets that just aren't in the game right now. If you really think critically about this, you can see why keeping the cutscenes in 4:3 was the only feasible option.
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Re: Adam Koralik explains the re-releases (4:3, audio etc)

Postby MiTT3NZ » Thu Jul 05, 2018 10:32 am

I'm aware of it. That's just culling faces, as it will only render what is registered on screen. Pretty sure they only used it in the first one n'all, but it shouldn't have anything to do with that. Then again, he did say it was an absolute mess.
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Re: Adam Koralik explains the re-releases (4:3, audio etc)

Postby Valascaziel » Thu Jul 05, 2018 10:38 am

You know, it is interesting how Adam pointed out along with James how incredibly complicated Shenmue's programming was. It was held together by "rubber bands" in a metaphorical sense.

I remember Yu talking about how he liked UE4 for Shenmue 3, but was more used to really getting his hands in there to code what he wants. Sounds like he really tinkered big time in Shenmue!

The true reason it is a miracle it runs, even on modern consoles is it takes an entire development team to replicate and transfer the particular coding of essentially one person.

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Re: Adam Koralik explains the re-releases (4:3, audio etc)

Postby shengoro86 » Thu Jul 05, 2018 11:11 am

I'm pretty happy with the HD versions. The mere fact they exist finally is a miracle.

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Re: Adam Koralik explains the re-releases (4:3, audio etc)

Postby dietsoap » Thu Jul 05, 2018 2:20 pm

Valascaziel wrote: You know, it is interesting how Adam pointed out along with James how incredibly complicated Shenmue's programming was. It was held together by "rubber bands" in a metaphorical sense.

I remember Yu talking about how he liked UE4 for Shenmue 3, but was more used to really getting his hands in there to code what he wants. Sounds like he really tinkered big time in Shenmue!

The true reason it is a miracle it runs, even on modern consoles is it takes an entire development team to replicate and transfer the particular coding of essentially one person.

Suzuki is just a complete monster of a man. I didn't realize this until recently, but Suzuki was also the lead hardware engineer for the Hang-on/Space Harrier board, Model 1, 2, 3, and Dreamcast/Naomi.
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Re: Adam Koralik explains the re-releases (4:3, audio etc)

Postby darkfalz » Mon Jul 09, 2018 1:16 pm

The game will be part port, part emulation, part HLE emulation from the sounds of it. This will probably mean graphical glitches and very little engine improvements (pop in, draw distance etc.) as it will be executing in the background on some kind of emulated SH4 core and maybe even HLE emulated PVR as well.

It's sad they couldn't get the original textures (ie. before the production resize for everything to fit in DC memory and on GD-ROM) and uncompressed audio but I really, really hope they aren't going to further dick with it (instead of emulate the DC Midi have streaming mp3 of the music, decompress the AHX and then recompress with something else, decompress the native PVR textures and then recompress etc.).

Hopefully the files will be as per the DC originals, that way it will be easy to mod back in the stuff they remove (brand names, weird Xbox texture swaps).
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Re: Adam Koralik explains the re-releases (4:3, audio etc)

Postby Sappharad » Mon Jul 09, 2018 8:13 pm

darkfalz wrote: The game will be part port, part emulation, part HLE emulation from the sounds of it. This will probably mean graphical glitches and very little engine improvements (pop in, draw distance etc.) as it will be executing in the background on some kind of emulated SH4 core and maybe even HLE emulated PVR as well.

It's sad they couldn't get the original textures (ie. before the production resize for everything to fit in DC memory and on GD-ROM) and uncompressed audio but I really, really hope they aren't going to further dick with it (instead of emulate the DC Midi have streaming mp3 of the music, decompress the AHX and then recompress with something else, decompress the native PVR textures and then recompress etc.).

There is no emulation. They've confirmed multiple times over that it's an actual port.

Secondly, they did get original textures, at least for the first game. It was pointed out in one of the released screenshots of Shenmue 1 that a huge building texture appeared to be at least 4x the detail of the original and some other textures had differences as well. Not everything would have been created at higher resolutions than the original hardware supported, because they would still need to be edited by an artist by hand to make sure they tile seamlessly. I suspect anything that originally came from a photo and didn't really have to be edited to tile well (like the aforementioned building) is all we're getting. Since it isn't emulated, it would have been easier for them to re-pack the source material than decompress all of the hardware-specific PowerVR textures and that's what they seem to have done.

Third, AHX is not platform specific; it's just a variant of MPEG2 audio. The CRI middleware is available for modern platforms, they continued to use it for previous Dreamcast ports like Sonic Adventure 2. Hence there's no reason to expect them to have recompress any of it. It sounds like they're just using it as-is.

Music is the only one where I think we'll just need to wait and see. Both games used the AM2 DPTK sound driver, which was ported to Xbox for that release, so there at least exists an x86 port of the newer version of it. But both platforms had audio chipsets that could mix 64 channels in hardware + DSP effects which might need to be done in software on modern hardware. I could see them just recording then streaming it all instead, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. They've got room for it.

Despite being very direct ports, all information available suggests that they actually did the best they could given that they were not instructed to change much.
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Re: Adam Koralik explains the re-releases (4:3, audio etc)

Postby darkfalz » Tue Jul 10, 2018 3:32 am

I think there is emulation. Sega have often put emulation in their Dreamcast ports (I know it's OOOLD, but Virtua Tennis 1 PC emulates the native SH4 code on a PC, even comes with the 1ST_READ.BIN file). The reason I think this is that large parts of the game were likely written in a low level for SH4 and I don't know if they'd have gone to the trouble of converting all that code to x86 instructions. I suspect these were emulated on the XBox at the time.

It should be easy to re-write the MIDI driver for modern systems if Sega were doing the port, rather than D3T. Because they have the hardware and software expertise - then again, it's been 20 years and Sega has been pulled apart since then. This is why I fear we're going to get streamed mp3 files... although this would require more rewriting of the core engine.

In the 2000s storage was still relatively expensive. You probably wouldn't hang on to too many uncompressed/original or even intermediate assets. I think mixing in random HD textures with an otherwise low res game would look pretty weird.

With redream looking better and better each release I'm less excited about the HD ports than I was 6 months ago. Although even redream doesn't allow us to play with language options (custom repacks notwithstanding). I just hope they don't have to remove too much stuff from the game for copyright purposes (capsule toys, soft drinks, watch texture).
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Re: Adam Koralik explains the re-releases (4:3, audio etc)

Postby Jibby » Tue Jul 10, 2018 4:49 am

It's getting to the point now where people are actually making up problems about these remasters to be worried about. Give it a rest.

There is no emulation. It's a source code port, being created by a company who literally exist to convert this kind code as faithfully as possible. That's why SEGA aren't doing it themselves. You can throw as many nonsense technological sounding things about SH-4 processors and audio codecs as you like but that doesn't make your baseless accusations any more solid.

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Re: Adam Koralik explains the re-releases (4:3, audio etc)

Postby mjq jazz bar » Tue Jul 10, 2018 10:18 am

The ultimate fact of the matter is it's obviously the most Sega is willing to do for Shenmue and until they see support and sales that merit their continued support of Shenmue, this is what we're getting. Buy 10 copies, tell your friends to buy 10 copies, buy your dog a copy--that's the only thing that's going to make a difference. It's not the ultra-deluxe package I would've personally wanted, but it's a start. I typically am very pro-consumer, but I will give Sega credit for releasing the games at a very, very reasonable price. To me, that shows they're not completely out of their minds and they do respect us.

There was just no way they were going to expend major funds and resources on a game that they have a very strange and strained relationship with.

As far as Denuvo is concerned, take it up with Sega. They put it on all their releases. It's not Shenmue-specific and I don't understand why some are acting like it is. I don't have a dog in that fight cuz I'm not a PC gamer, but there you go.

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Re: Adam Koralik explains the re-releases (4:3, audio etc)

Postby RiGoRmOrTiS » Tue Jul 10, 2018 12:15 pm

Jibby wrote: It's getting to the point now where people are actually making up problems about these remasters to be worried about. Give it a rest.

There is no emulation. It's a source code port, being created by a company who literally exist to convert this kind code as faithfully as possible. That's why SEGA aren't doing it themselves. You can throw as many nonsense technological sounding things about SH-4 processors and audio codecs as you like but that doesn't make your baseless accusations any more solid.



This a million times. The negative internet circle jerk wasn't this toxic back in 2001. It's all attention seeking imo
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Re: Adam Koralik explains the re-releases (4:3, audio etc)

Postby darkfalz » Tue Jul 10, 2018 12:21 pm

I'm not being negative. I'm just giving reasons we won't be seeing 1/10th of the improvements possible in a real port (all confirmed).

I'm happy to have a fast loading, language swappable relatively glitch-free emulated port.
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